Symphony No. 6 (2001). Philip Glass

There's
something almost perversely admirable about the consistency with which Philip
Glass keeps plowing the same musical acreage. His Sixth Symphony, a massive
setting of Allen Ginsberg's "Plutonian Ode," presses his trademark arpeggios
and two-against-three rhythms into slightly new shape as a lusty protest march.

Glass realizes this. He said in the interview that he's been trying to
escape his own compositional processes, and when faced with the reality
of the sameness of his output- "its humbling" he says..... I'd say.

"This work is based on a poem of Allen Ginsberg called Plutonian Ode. Allen and I had devised a number of works for performance to-gether [including Hydrogen Jukebox] and this was something that we intended to do. Alan died too soon for us even to begin working on the work. After his death in 1997, I waited a number of years and finally de-cided to finish it. I decided to make it into a work for voice and orchestra. My original idea was a work for piano and narrator, but with him gone no one really reads poetry the way he did, so I went in a different direction altogether and wrote for soprano and orchestra."